Vladimir Putin has blamed Vladimir Lenin for the collapse of the Soviet Union.
“There were a lot of ideas like autonomation and so on. They put an atomic bomb under the building we call Russia and then it blew up. We didn’t need any world revolution,” Putin said at a meeting of the Presidential Council for Science and Education.
The president was responding to Mikhail Kovalchuk, the director of the Kurchatov Institute, who quoted a poem by Boris Pasternak, “High Disease,” which describes Lenin as follows: “By steering thought flows, he steered the country.” Kovalchuk proposed establishing scientific organizations that could also steer Russia’s scientific thought flows “in concrete directions.”
“Steering thought flows is the right approach, but you have to be sure that the idea behind it all leads to the right results, and not the ones Lenin had in mind. In the end, after all, his ideas led to the collapse of the Soviet Union,” Putin said.
In 2005, Putin famously called the collapse of the USSR “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century.”